Alison Brackenbury: Carcanet Comes to Cheltenham

Alison Brackenbury, poet

Dear reader, 

In Cheltenham we do not go to Festivals. They come to us. This spring has blown in, for the second year, with the young and hopeful Cheltenham Poetry Festival.

Two readings and routine busyness kept me from many of its hard-won riches. But on Friday, sheltered from battering hailstorms, I read with fellow poets from the lively anthologies of the Grey Hen Press. Behind a public bar in the Lower High Street, Cheltenham’s traditional site for bull-baiting, I was startled to see the high roof and pale oak of what appeared to be a medieval barn. In the evening, poetry echoed beneath an even loftier roof, in the severe ship of the University chapel founded by Francis Close. 

It is claimed locally that this fierce Victorian clergyman disapproved of most human activities, especially on Sundays. Did he summon hailstones upon the poets? Impenitent in my pew, I approved of memorable readings from Angela France and Penelope Shuttle, followed by Martin Figura’s show Whistle, his own story, haunted by murder and Europe’s dark wars. On Saturday, I read in the chapel and discovered that Victorian preachers indulged themselves with the finest acoustics, entirely deserved by my fellow readers from Carcanet, the quietly moving P.J.Kavanagh, and Dan Burt, whose violent, vivid life would furnish at least three writers.

Was Dean Close hovering on Sunday, when the door codes of Cheltenham College nearly imprisoned Charles Tomlinson and most of his friends from Carcanet? Well, we captured the castle. I cannot do justice to this intense celebration of Charles’ work, introduced by Michael Schmidt. The reading of Charles’ poems by Brenda, his wife, held a measured beauty.  Tomlinson’s influence was praised in readings from younger writers, Rory Waterman and Lucy Tunstall. Anthony Rudolf paid eloquent tribute, Julian Stannard was graceful in Italian, David Morley a verbal whirlwind. I was particularly struck by Elaine Feinstein’s reading of a poem called ‘Class’: a wickedly sharp piece which Elaine read with the perfect short ‘A’ of the Midlands accent she and Tomlinson shared in youth.

Then, brushing past the outraged shade of Dean Close, I raced back to the Lower High Street pub, to hear two young poets: Adam Horovitz and Helen Mort. Confidently, they recalled the past: Adam’s ‘singing streets’ of Sunderland, Helen’s battle between miners and police at Orgreave. The barn’s chill shadow was filled by their words. Poetry had driven out bull-baiting, until fresh darkness fell.

*

New Collected Poems
by Charles Tomlinson
£20, free UK delivery

Charles Tomlinson was born in Stoke on Trent in 1927. He studied at Cambridge with Donald Davie and taught at the University of Bristol from 1957 until his retirement. He has published many collections of poetry as well as volumes of criticism and translation, and has edited The Oxford Book of Verse in Translation (1980). His poetry has won international recognition and has received many prizes in Europe and the United States, including the 1993 Bennett Award from the Hudson Review; the New Criterion Poetry Prize, 2002; the Premio Internazionale di Poesia Ennio Flaiano, 2001; and the Premio Internazionale di Poesia Attilio Bertolucci, 2004. He is an Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences and of the Modern Language Association. Charles Tomlinson was made a CBE in 2001 for his contribution to literature.

Alison Brackenbury was born in Lincolnshire in 1953 and studied at Oxford. She now lives in Gloucestershire, where she works, as a director and manual worker, in the family metal finishing business. Her Carcanet collections include Dreams of Power (1981), Breaking Ground (1984), Christmas Roses (1988), Selected Poems (1991), 1829 (1995), After Beethoven (2000) and Bricks and Ballads (2004). Her poems have been included on BBC Radio 3 and 4, and 1829 was produced by Julian May for Radio 3. Her work recently won a Cholmondeley Award. Her latest collection is Singing in the Dark (2008, see above): 'A quiet lyricism and delight' (the Guardian). Her new book, Then, will be published by Carcanet in 2013.